Mrs Lenthal Swifte: her moment of 'fame'

 

Today's fun discovery. It caught my eye, because of the name of Joseph Tapley, one of the top contendors for the title of pretty-boy-tenor-of-the-Victorian-age ...

But who in heaven's name is Mrs Lenthal Swifte?  And it isn't Black-Eyed Susan as one might have expected, because the sailor is 'Charles', not 'William'.

So what is this?  When?  

Well, I discovered quite quickly 'what'.  Charles and Susan are hero and soubrette in the one-act operetta Prizes and Blanks, adapted from the well-known The Lottery Ticket, and first produced at Ladbroke Hall 29 June 1885 by ... Mrs Lenthal Swifte. And yes, the name (with or without assumed hyphen) is real. It was even respectable.

Edmund Lenthal Swifte was the venerable keeper of the crown jewels, and his son Alexander was born in the Tower of London. Alexander toyed with the army, but decided instead to become a painter. He also decided to marry. His bride was a young widow named [Annie Alice] Maud Anderson.

Mrs Anderson was born in Capetown, 6 May 1859, daughter of an army captain named George Davies (73rd foot), and she had become Mrs William Thomas Anderson ('son of Rev Matthew Anderson of Buckland House, Alwyne Rd, Canonbury') 21 September 1880. The marriage was brief: the husband died 26 January 1883. Widowhood was brief also. Maud married Lenthal Swifte 14 February 1884. I  don't know whether Maud had been a public performer previously, but this matinee is my first sighting of her:

I was disappointed to find that Tapley didn't 'create' the part of Charles. Mr Hulbert Luther Fulkerson (1849-1910) was an American music teacher who doesn't seem to have sung solo very often. So it seems that Mrs Swifte must have played 'her' operetta on other occasion(s).  Other folk certainly did. Percy North toured it soon after with his concert party which included among its cast the young Hayden Coffin and Sir George Power, Edith Brandon from the German Reed establishment ...

Maud ('professional vocalist' hmmm) was obviously capable. She appeared in pro-am concerts between 1885-1890 with the usual criminals: Monari Rocca, Ria, Miss Wakefield, et al, and in charity cases, and was able to truthfully bill herself as being 'of the Albert Hall and Crystal Palace concerts'. Both venues, of course, had Concerts and concerts. More often, she could be seen at the Victoria Hall. But not all that often. 

And then her husband died. Aged 37. Maud was lethal for a man's health. However he left her with a daughter: Evelyn Ethel Lenthal Swifte ...

And Maud sang on. Occasionally. She joined a wee concert group run by a striving (married) baritone who called himself 'Stanley Heaton'. His real name was Alfred Wright. From Syonsby, Leics. When being grand, he called himself Alfred Stanley Heaton-Wright.  Oh those hyphens. Although he seems to have had a wife and children, she 'married' him ...

Alfred was, I think, a bad bargain. I see him being arrested and jailed for theft in Brighton in 1898 ...  

Anyway, the 1939 census shows us Maud living with Evelyn and her husband, Rev Alfred Theodore Coldman, and there she died, aged 82, at the Rectory, Henley on Thames, in September 1940, billed as .. sigh ... Mrs Heaton-Wright.  Oh those hyphens! 

I would go on about Tapley, except that I've done so before ... he ended up chucking the music world and becoming a farmer in Canada ...

Well. I went a bit further ... but I think that is enough, don't you?